The present invention relates to a paging receiver having a display and, more particularly, to a paging receiver having a display and improved alerting means which allows the user of the receiver to set any desired alert tone pattern therein.
Alerting means incorporated in the above-described type of paging receiver for alerting the user to an incoming call is available in some different types, i.e., a type causing a vibrator to vibrate, a type causing an indicator implemented by an LED (Light Emitting Diode) to flash, a type causing a speaker to sound, and a type which is the combination of any of such types. The sound type alerting means may even be constructed to selectively produce either one of a loud tone and a low tone, either one of a high-pitched tone and a low-pitched tone, or any one of a plurality of different tone patterns, as proposed in the art. Such a construction allows the user to identify, for example, the person who is calling or the level degree of importance of the call. Regarding the plurality of tone patterns, each of them has a particular number of intermittent tones and a particular tone length per predetermined time. It has been customary for a manufacturer to write a predetermined set of tone patterns in all of the paging receivers at the production stage. This brings about a problem when some persons carrying paging receivers produced by the same manufacturer use the receivers at the same location. Namely, the user of a given paging receiver cannot readily see whether the receiver being called in the user's receiver or whether it is another person's receiver, since all the receivers share identical tone patterns. This forces the user of the paging receiver to look at the display for confirmation every time the receiver is called.